and their BFFs, the Republican Party, along with the gun huggers who have been deluded by the NRA, are all responsible for not only the staggering number of gun deaths and injuries, but also for the overwhelming medical costs of this gun violence epidemic.
From the article referenced in the OP:
To come up with their tally, Spitzer and her colleagues scoured the hospital bills of 267,265 patients across the country who were injured by guns between 2006 and 2014.
These patients were overwhelmingly male, and most of them were admitted to large, urban teaching hospitals. About 43% of the victims were treated in the South, where the proportion of uninsured patients was highest. And nationally, 30% of gunshot victims treated in hospitals during the study period were insured by Medicaid.
Is it just a coincidence that the demographics of these injuries are the same as the sales market targeted by the NRA?
“Firearm-related injuries place a particular burden on governmental payers and the poor,” the study authors wrote. In addition to the 29% of patients nationwide who were insured by Medicaid, which largely serves low-income and disabled Americans, more than 4 out of 5 of the uninsured patients “fell below the 50th income percentile.”
This group is unlikely to be able to pay their medical bills, and so these costs are often written off as losses to the hospitals that provide the care. The cost of keeping those hospitals open, in turn, is typically borne by taxpayers in the form of local tax levies or block grants to the states.
So when the right-wing 1% eliminates Medicaid and allows nationwide concealed carry by 18-year-olds, who will pay for these gun injuries and emergency room visits? The NRA, or the American public?
Until now, the most recent estimate of the cost of firearm injuries extended only through 1997 and used hospital data from only two states.
That’s very likely because in 1996, gun rights advocates on Capitol Hill began forbidding the use of federal funds “to advocate or promote gun control” and federal funds to conduct research on firearms injuries virtually dried up. While the Obama administration last year proposed a welter of initiatives to reduce gun injuries, few are likely to be funded by a GOP-led Congress.
To sum up, the right-wing gun lobby, as represented by the Trumpster, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell, wants to increase gun sales (which will increase gun injuries and deaths) by loosening gun laws, eliminate the source of medical funding which currently keeps the gun huggers alive after they shoot each other, and as with climate change and most science, stifle any fact gathering about gun violence.
In any other "civilized" society this would be seen as ethnic cleansing, or "herd culling."
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